The Inadequacy of the Abundance Agenda
The books in question are Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, by Marc J. Dunkelman, a former congressional staffer; Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, by Yoni Appelbaum, an academic historian and deputy executive editor at The Atlantic; and Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers, respectively, at The New York Times and The Atlantic. Dunkelman’s book, the best of the lot, argues persuasively that Jeffersonian local-control liberalism can get in the way of Hamiltonian big-central-government liberalism—but Dunkelman makes too much of that problem. Appelbaum’s book supplies rich narrative detail on the dishonorable history of zoning (it began with the ghettoizing of Jews), but he’s weak on economic analysis. Klein and Thompson are better on economics but less persuasively tethered to the real world, replete with sentences such as “Our era features too little utopian thinking” that lend their book the antiseptic tone of a TED Talk.
Collectively, these books advocate what might be called supply-side liberalism. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the hell with demand, let’s just create more stuff. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the government should get out of the way. But their preferred method to achieve this is not tax cuts but deregulation, typically at the local rather than federal level.
“Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked,” write Klein and Thompson, “is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.” Well, sure. But ignoring demand is also a convenient way to dodge potentially divisive questions about distribution. “The world we want requires more than redistribution,” Klein and Thompson state grandly. “We aspire to more than parceling out the present.” That doesn’t offer much sustenance to the rest of us drudges condemned to inhabit 2025.
